Abstract

The European Union’s center-piece of economic policy making is the Lisbon process, which tries to make Europe the most competitive economic region in the world economy by 2010. EU Commission President Jose Manuel Durao Barroso recently presented a Centre for European Reform (CER) study that maintained that Denmark, Sweden and Austria are the best performing Lisbon process countries for 2005 and that Romania, Poland and Malta are the lowest ranked countries in the European Union in the same year. Due to lacking data, practically no serious conclusions can be drawn about Turkey. In the study, presented by the Commission President, some real finger pointing is made, with the “good” performers being called “heroes” and the “bad performers” being called “villains”. In the study, Poland was made the European chief “villain” (henceforth called, in keeping with this tendency towards abbreviations in the eurocracy, the ECV, for 2005). Our rigorous re-analysis of the data leads us to the conclusion that the ECV, i.e. the country characterized by past bad cumulated performance, and having no real prospect of things getting better is not Poland but Portugal. It emerges once again that the Lisbon process is in a dire state of affairs